skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is this a neat idea? Sure. But it's nowhere near $150 worth of value. (And, based on their "limited time" copy, it's likely going to rise to a more egregious price in the future.) I'm actually dumbstruck that they've sold 2500 of these. Admittedly, not having leave your couch to lock up or being able to check the status of your locks remotely is by all means a nice offering, but for the price, it's just not worth it.

Incidentally, this is also just a workaround. It's a hack. It's likely not to work in all homes or with all locks.

Moreover, this thing will likely look out of place and fairly undesirable on most doors, especially on older buildings.

An actual installable lock would be incredibly more compelling due to the fact that it will be less bulky and intrusive.
Ask HN: Sign up with Credit Card for trial or not?
Is it better to force customers to give you there Credit Card details to sign up for a free trial of your software or to allow them to do the trial without a Credit Card and then ask for it at the end of the trial.

Please reply if you have tried one or both and what you discovered.
Let's say I know a little bit about crypto in general, and wanted to write a software implementation of Keccak/SHA-3 as an academic endeavor. How hard would it be? I'm not looking to produce something that will be certifiably secure against side channel attacks, just something that is reasonably performant and can produce the correct results.
also, you need to be careful about your assumptions about the sizeof a pointer and the sizeof an integer.
And now we have all the silly arguments comparing web frameworks and CMS's.

The CMS people will compare installing modules to writing code from scratch instead of installing a library and writing a bit of glue code. If they don't make that mistake they will probably underestimate how much more flexible, better written and better tested that library will be compared to the CMS module and overestimate how hard it is to glue in a general purpose library.

The web framework people will underestimate just how fast it is to install a module into a completely integrated system and underestimate the time they would have spent integrating the library and writing the glue code. They'll also overestimate how often a client needs a piece of functionality that's in any way interesting instead of just a new skin on the same old thing.

The answer is "The progression goes: CMS -> Web Framework -> Http related libraries"

The question can be any of the following:

"What web related stuff has the worst code quality? what has the best?"

"How will the tools I use change as I get more experience in web development"

"What tools will I use for the most boring web dev work? What about the most interesting?"

"What tool skillsets in web development will earn me the most money"

"What tool skillsets have the least amount of jobs? what about the most?"

"What tools web dev tools will make me want to punch my monitor the most? and the least?"

Feel free to come up with your own.
> The gap between an hourly worker's wages in the US versus China is shrinking, due to Chinese labor inflation and US collar wage stagnation.

And people say Americans don't need unions anymore.
I think this is really a consequence of the effect that Facebook is having on the web.

Facebook is a looming spectre of sorts. Normally, we would use a web browser/computer to view the web and network, but Facebook has such a broad mission and reach that now brands reduce their exposure to Facebook pages. Facebook has such a broad and commercially internalized reach (so many people know about Facebook now) that for the consumer, it's just easier. To a certain degree, the concept of a "website" is disappearing. This may be extreme though.
Junot Diaz was my writing teacher at MIT. "Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao." He's really into comic books, the apocalypse, Dominican immigrants, New Jersey.
stfu ho.
Please give the "Million Short It On" challenge a try at http://www.MillionShortItOn.com challenge a try. You might be surprised by Million Short for long tail searches.
For kicks and giggles I switched to Bing on Safari on OS X and iOS to see if I'm denying myself search results. I'd assess the results and sometimes I'd go with what Bing returned but instinctively I'd end up going back to Google to get more accurate results.

I think it's going to take more than "The Pepsi Challenge" to get people to switch. To get people to switch Google would have to start giving worse results than it gives now. Otherwise you're likely not changing. Even if Bing gave better results I'm not sure people would switch due to inertia.
I should've added, the prices have to be tied to some value.

So for example, what you could do is give everyone 10,000 play dollars at the start, and they can buy/sell whatever "sites" they want at the going prices. But every day (week?), there's a payout -- if you own one share of site X, and site X is #n in the rankings, you get a dividend of say 50,000 - n cents.

Then if I think that site X will be in 1000th place, I should be willing to pay up to $490.00 for a share, because that's how much I expect it to pay off for me. Something like that.
I did not mean everything is text; take it as everything is electrons, numbers, and text/pictures/video/emails/etc., and a other layers too. There's no "right" or "true" abstraction layer, they're all true. Not necessarily the same kind of true in absolutely every case, but there's no "true" true here, where one can dismiss some layer or other as not important. The forest and the trees are both true.
We're hoping to connect devices like the Kill-a-watt to people's smart phones. Gamification is totally in the mix!

We are trying to figure out if just knowing if something is on or off (not the energy usage) could be valuable if we could do this for the whole house.
20 Examples of Timeline in Web Design
Coupons and offers which are built into Facebook now. "calbear81 just claimed an offer for $10 off 24 pack of Ultra Soft Charmin toilet paper".
Lenovo's Facebook Page Surging with Posts from Unhappy Customers
I'm not sure this is correct. You're assuming there are algorithmic changes to search that will substantially improve results to the point where the average user will notice - like there was when google made its rise.

At this point-barring some revolutionary new way to search-Microsoft might have to heavily invest in advertisements to gain any ground.
I found myself feeling better about search results because they were styled like Google's results. I was assuming they were pulling a switcheroo on me, but they werent.
I was starting to work on almost this exact same tldr concept recently but decided to shift to another project instead. It's great to see another group of people tackling the signal to noise issue. It's definitely a growing problem that needs to be solved. Great start thus far and I'm excited to see where you take this!
Yes, but it's still a great move by Microsoft.

Look at it this way: how many of the people who visit the page are going to switch away from Bing to Google?

Probably not too many. So even if they just get lucky one in fifty times with a search on which bing does much better, that's a huge net positive for if lots of people try it out.
That depends on your costs associated with a new signup. If they're nominal, then don't ask for a credit card, you're almost guaranteed a better conversion rate. If they're high (you often need to handhold new users through some kind of setup, your service is attractive to spammers or some other bad element you'll have to clean up after, it's resource-intensive to service each user, etc) then require a credit card to filter out all but the most committed prospects.
Anyone else notice one of the engineers does not blink in the video?
I read a lot of PDFs, specifically programming books. I like my 7" Android tablet (Kindle Fire 1st Gen) but I find the reading experience terrible in comparison to the iPad 3. There really doesn't seem to be any way to display technical books on a 7" screen unless they are specifically designed for such a task. I had to sell the iPad a while back, so now I may take a look at the 8.9" Kindle Fire to see if it's big enough to properly display my PDFs.

While I'm interested in it, there is one thing about the 8.9" Kindle Fire that really disappointed me already. They advertise $50 a year for a mobile connection, but it's only for the first year. When you take a look at the huge price increase between the Wifi and the ATT 3G version, it's not a discount, you are just being forced to prepay for your service. Other than that, it looks pretty nice.
Wow. This sounds exactly like a complaint that would be lobbed against SharePoint (rightfully so, it's a special kind of hellish nightmare for people responsible for developing on it.)
I think this is not correct. Microsoft spends a lot in R&D. According to this [1] (as of d 3/21/2012):

The top 10 companies and the amount they spend on R&D
(in billions) in the past 12 months were, according to
S&P Capital IQ:
• Microsoft (MSFT): $9.4
• Pfizer (PFE): $8.4
• Intel (INTC): $8.4
• Merck (MRK): $8.3
• Johnson & Johnson (JNJ): $7.5
• International Business Machines (IBM): $6.3
• Cisco Systems (CSCO): $5.6
• Google (GOOG): $5.2
• Eli Lilly (LLY): $5.0
• Oracle (ORCL): $4.4
Apple is 18th on the list, spending $2.6 billion, behind other
technology giants such as Microsoft, Intel, IBM, Cisco, Oracle,
Qualcomm, Hewlett-Packard and Amazon.com. Apple's R&D spending
as a percentage of its revenue of $127.8 billion was 2%.

[1] http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/perfi/columnist/krantz/...
It's OK if my analysis is flawed because I'm not trolling for page hits. I did write that on my Air though.
I've noticed this to be the case too with other courses. So for this one I've decided to implement everything in Scala (I'm currently taking the functional programming course as well. This will work well since this machine learning course requires no code submission and just questions about the results
When was PHP good in the past? (Honest question; I don't use PHP.)
My car (a Hyundai) is keyless like that so you just need the key to be on your person. There's no technical reason why this couldn't be done with NFC on a mobile phone, but I think the excuse would be about car thefts. Modern cars all use chipped keys that are really stringently tied to dealers and car thefts have plummeted during recent years.

It's a lot more convenient than I would have guessed though, one of the nice bits that I noticed is my car lights up when I walk up to it at night. Not bright, but the LED under the mirror illuminates the ground around the driver side door. Very neat.
Export and import AWS SimpleDB data across accounts and regions
I agree, I much prefer the old logo. It stood the test of time and to be honest was much more interesting without being garish. The new logo just looks plain, boring, and forgettable.
Trivial. See this "Readable C implementation of Keccak": http://www.mjos.fi/dist/readable_keccak.tgz
this.
No offense to these professors, but what are they presenting in their video lectures that I can't garner from their writing?
Right, you can get more out of the assignments if you try, but to me the purpose of assignments (versus passive learning - lectures, reading, etc.) is to force your brain to synthesize rather than just comprehend. The ideal assignment, then, is one that forces you to synthesize as many concepts it intends to teach as possible.

Just like you could go back and implement for yourself the skeleton code they handed you, you could also go out and implement everything in the lectures without any assignments at all. It's just that, like you said, the assignments provide a useful starting point. And I'm only saying they could be even more useful by requiring you to implement more of the complete pipeline.

The fact that an incredibly self-motivated person could learn everything there is to know about machine learning with the course as a starting point doesn't mean that it's bad to make the course more useful for a somewhat lazier or less interested person.
We will still need safety systems in tunnels though, and lack of those is why they shut the tunnels down. Ignore the misleading quotes about the variable limit signs not working, the real issue is the tunnel is not safe if there is a problem like a fire of fume buildup.
Quite possibly never, but it was arguably the best web language in the early 2000s.
I think this is a great idea, and would be really useful for any place where you need to give a lot of people access to the building. If you're renting your home out through Airbnb, being able to give people temp access to your home would be really convenient and also safer than giving them a physical key that they can copy. If you're renting out an apartment or office, lockitron will save the landlord from having to rekey the building after each tenant. The $150 cost is easily recouped if you consider the cost of getting new locks. When I'm expecting the maid to come over to my house, I would love to give them remote access if I'm not home.
I'd expect the look of the lock to change substantially with updates, but the conveniences it brings is pretty amazing.
I would say test both.

In the absence of a test, I would say free trial and then get the CC details. My logic being; I would prefer eyeballs on my product for a period (if it is not too expensive to do so) as they may come back a year or more later when they are ready to pay. If you do the CC up-front most people will never experience your product and it wont be recalled so easily.
Fun and games with Apache's mod_headers
Bing does far less word-stemming in my experience which is probably because of inferior technology but it's often a more desirable result.

For instance if you search a weird business name, Google tries to make it into more statistically and phonetically common words. Bing gives you more of a literal search. So they're going to wow a proportion of users who find that's what they want.

Google is so annoying sometimes with word-stemming. You used to be able to use the + sign to turn it off. Then you had to use quotes. Now the quotes don't even seem to work. Sometime Google is too smart for its own good.
If anybody from Microsoft is reading this:

I will switch to Bing if you enable SSL search.

I tried it for a few weeks w/o SSL and I liked it. Until then I will not use it, nor recommend it to anybody else.
This is quibbling over semantics. Drupal's custom content types, custom fields, and Views all allow developers to express complex logic that would, in any other development environment, be expressed as code and committed to version control -- creating a new content type in Drupal and adding fields to it is exactly analogous to creating a new model in Django. You can call it "configuration" if that makes it easier to justify its being in a table, but it doesn't change the fact that Drupal developers spend lots of time building shit that can't go in a VCS, can't be easily tested, can't be branched/merged, and can't be easily deployed without a convoluted export/import dance. Just because there isn't literal code in the database, it doesn't mean there's a clean logic/content separation.
I think it's important to also consider that most of the user's trying the 'Bing It On' challenge are already at least considering switching services or interested enough in bing to give it a shot. Even if 33% of these users went on to use Bing more after, this doesn't represent your average google user.

I also doubt that 33% who say that are going to use it more actually will. If it was that easy Bing would already be huge.
I've taken both, and the code is in fact not that much simpler than it was in the original class. There are, however, two huge differences: the algorithm is spoon-fed to you, and there is no math.

Firstly, think about how much more difficult the assignments would be if, for example, the steps weren't broken out and we didn't get any advice on how to vectorize. Of course, it would still be short work for anyone who (a) knows Matlab/Octave and/or (b) understands the material well, but it would also be an order of magnitude harder.

Secondly - and this is by far the larger point - the original CS 229 was really about math; the programming assignments were more of an afterthought. The lectures and homework mainly focused on the theoretical derivations and corollaries of the math that led to the algorithms. Once you'd done your bit on the math and cried to your classmates and the TA about it, you could go and implement the beautiful and extremely succinct result in Matlab.

As for my perspective on the difference, I believe it is a deliberate choice made with full knowledge of the difficulty drop. For starters, there are (with regards to homework help) no TAs in this course, so the absolute difficulty would have to decline to create an equivalent experience. More significantly, the enrollment has increased by a factor of about 700. If Stanford students had trouble with the original, you can bet that the median student in the course doesn't find it as easy as either of us does. If the goal is to generate the greatest benefit for the most people, and delivering the algorithms with a good intuition on their proper use will do so, then this course has succeeded marvelously. Of course, the smartest and most dedicated students will want more, which remains available through textbooks as well as the original course handouts (http://cs229.stanford.edu/materials.html). However, I would argue that the goal of most MOOCs (massive open online courses) should be to kindle interest and foster basic understanding, both of which the Coursera version achieves.
(PCM) -> Do you mean PCA (Pricipal Component Analysis)?
Startup ≈ Gamble
Perl fans would probably object strongly to that, but it is true that when PHP first caught on there really weren't any great choices.
When the title started off with 33%, I simply dismissed it as bad math = bad article.
Acoustic Cell-Sorting Chip Holds Promise For Tricorder-like Medical Sensing
Well not quite. While SVMs gained a lot of popularity for having nice properties e.g.

1) a convex problem which means a unique solution and a lot of already existing technology can be used
2) the "kernel trick" which enables us to learn in complicated spaces without computing the transformations
3) can be trained online, which makes them great for huge datasets (here the point 2) might not apply - but there exist ways - if someone's interested I can point out some papers)

There is an ongoing craze about deep belief networks developed by Hinton (who is teaching this course) who came up with an algorithm that can train them (there exist local optima and such, so it's far from ideal). Some of the reasons they're popular

1) They seem to be winning algorithm for many competitions / datasets, ranging from classification in computer vision to speech recognition and if I'm not mistaken even parsing. They are for example used in the newer Androids.
2) They can be used in an unsupervised mode to _automatically_ learn different representations (features) of the data, which can be then used in subsequent stages of the classification pipeline. This makes them very interesting because while labelled data might be hard to get by, we have a lot of unlaballed datasets thanks to the Internet. As what they can do - see the work by Andrew Ng when they automatically learned a cat detector.
3) They're "similar" to biological neural networks, so one might think they have the necessary richness for many interesting AI applications.
It's interesting that you throw the Apple comment in out of context and blow your argument as a result. Apple's amazing success with low R&D expenditure shows how small the relationship between R&D and great products is.

It also says a lot about accounting, as how time is booked in an accounting system for tax purposes will drastically alter those numbers, even if the same work gets done.
Interesting point; this has bothered me as well. I'm usually reduced to re-searching with "query -word -word" to remove the results targeted by the stemmed words.
I wanted to take this "Bing it on" challenge that they have banners for all over the site. Clicking it takes me to vanilla bing.com, not a challenge site.
Something that would probably be worthy of a blog post: the Google results in the Bing It On challenge are unfairly neutered.

Try doing the Bing It On search for something like "radiohead". You see two columns of plain old search results, both are fine. But if you go straight to Google.com and search for "radiohead", you get more than just the normal search results, you get a bunch of extra details on the right side of the page. Those extra details are super relevant and helpful, like the band's members, popular songs, upcoming events, etc. If you go to Bing.com and try the same thing, it also has some extra stuff on the right, but it isn't nearly as good.

This happens for lots of searches. Google often shows some really helpful domain-specific information, but that extra stuff doesn't show up in the Bing it On challenge.
Indeed - I guess there are some things people don't want to hear.
The way it's worded is not 100% clear. Hinton, who is an excellent lecturer and explainer, is talking about neural nets trained with "deep learning" techniques (not vanilla single-hidden-layer nets), which have had striking success at hard vision problems that have been difficult to solve top-to-bottom with SVMs (e.g., you could get good performance from an SVM, but you'd have to go on a hunt for good low-level features first).

That said, there is a rather unhelpful herd mentality in the field, with people moving from one Next Big Thing to another, disparaging the previous Big Thing along the way.
It doesn't matter why its flawed, its just worth thinking things through clearly. I'm always wondering how these articles are re-butted within 6 hours by another counterpoint. More likely than not, these are PR plants. I cant imagine who else would be sitting around on their ass waiting to write these stories. But what do I know.
It depends on how much you value your time. Lectures usually are shorter than 2 hours per week. (There are some that have longer videos, but I think more than 2 hours is suboptimal.) I know that before courses I was wasting this time on hacker news or reddit, so I don't value my time that much. On the other hand I do now, and that's because I need to watch the lectures and do the home work. And really these lectures perform the same role in the learning process as the real lectures. You could graduate from university only with text books, but you might not get some insight that lecturers have.

My 0.02 chf.
I'm saying that racism exists because of how we treat the poor in general.
I use Bing as my default search engine, but for anything tech related, if I have trouble finding it on Bing, I switch to Google. There is clearly a difference between the two.

Google seems to have simply more pages indexed and that helps with obscure error messages or API usages, but seems to hinder it when searching for anything relatively common.
Time to beat this dead horse again!

PHP as a language isn't great, since it has been around the block in a volatile environment (the web) and shows lack of foresight in language design.

However, PHP is experiencing a renascence with modular components, frameworks and tools utilizing established design patterns, and an overall boost in contribution and collaboration in the open-source community, in large part thanks to Github.

PHP is not dead, and vibrant communities around Symfony and Doctrine are pushing it forward considerably.

In my opinion, large applications can and have been built primarily on PHP while leveraging other languages and tools for their strengths.
I think this is the closest thing I've seen to valid use of the marquee tag.
An attempt to design a reasonable computer science curriculum using just Coursera courses, where “reasonable” is a curriculum that roughly mirrors the coursework required for a four-year university computer science degree:
http://www.thesimplelogic.com/2012/09/24/you-say-you-want-an...